They go for punk rock at the most physical level, until their rhythms feel almost like a rave, as in the seven-minute 'Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From an Angel).'

She still goes into circles sometimes, but you might too if you could roll a phrase around your tongue the way Wainwright can. [July 2008, p.77]

The resulting monster is alternately charming and schizo. [July 2008, p.71]

Producer Guy Sigsworth (Seal, Björk, Madonna) adds a touch of Eurodisco to her infatuation-junkie rambles.

There's an exhilarating, disorienting sense of freedom tot he album, the ruse of rules being ignored. [Aug 2008, p.79]

They’ve buried those strengths deep to make way for a humorless new approach that borrows the turgid bleariness of Oasis (“Living’s much too easy and dying will be some kind of bore”) but misses the Gallaghers’ pomp and glory.

Treading his father’s path, he’s never sounded so comfortably himself.

Williams' rapping is thankfully peripheral and the music is a fantastic, distracting mess. [Aug 2008, p.90]

A party band to the core, the Ting Tings can't leave the dance floor without stumbling. [July 2008, p.76]

On this produced-in-Paris gem, they beef up chilly synth-pop tunes with elegantly distorted guitar, German-industrial drum loops and plenty of goth gloom.

Weezer dwells on his well-documented obsessions with bad girlfriends and geek nostalgia, but without the usual giddy, mathematically precise songcraft.

With its stories of faithless lovers, broken relationships and speed-dealing suburban doctors, @#%&*! Smilers almost seems to feed off the stagnation. [Aug 2008, p.88]

Rossdale still has that sexy catch in his throat, but his new songs are ass, evoking a mealy-mouthed, cliché-ridden, bombastic Chris Cornell solo joint more than Bush, and whoever Auto-Tuned the vocals has some explaining to do.

The melodies are often limp, the rhythm section disappointingly friction-free, and Cumming’s main lyrical M.O. is to name-drop coke constantly, like the doofus at a party who mistakes a key bump for a badge of cool.

None of the album rocks, or gets particularly rootsy. [July 2008, p.72]

[Meiburg] applies this Audubon-ish enthusiasm to his songs, too, crafting a rich, occasionally macabre, fantasy world populated by starlings, gulls and solitary falconers.

Prog was rarely as songful as the brutal beauty here.

The result is music that is excitingly in and out of time. [Aug 2008, p.88]

Usher has called Here I Stand his “grown and sexy” album, and he’s half right. Apart from a couple of A­up-tempo tracks by Danjahandz (“Appetite”) and Scandinavians-of-the-moment Stargate (“What’s a Man to Do”), the production is cocktail-lounge crunk, full of splashy cymbals, jazzy electric guitar and tinkly pianos.

Beyond Green’s wriggly, giggly, purring-to-screaming magnificence (as well as two smoking support vocals by young acolyte Anthony Hamilton), this is an album of intricate groove.

A&E is generally more subdued, but, like Pierce’s earlier work, it’s best at its most theatrical.

Lauper hasn’t sounded this relevant since her 1983 debut, when she celebrated female masturbation.

Not all connect, but a bonus disc, the soon-vanished 2002 full-length Nothing to Fear, compensates. Buy this before it vanishes, too.

Sonically, it's a tour de force.... But the success of this record depends on Johansson and she's not up yo the task. [June 2008, p.73]

His second solo album (which he dedicates to Pimp C, his partner in the pioneering Houston rap duo UGK who died of a codeine overdose last December) features blunts, ho's and Caddy-shaking beats galore--but also elegantly constructed takedowns of corrupt politicians, covetous ministers and crooked police.

Fervent and fierce, with a half-earned world-weariness that can recall Johnny Rotten himself, the Dresden Dolls mean to make goth theatrically smart. Quite often, they do. [July 2008, p.71]

On their self-titled fourth album, one colon-blowing mid-tempo after another shows the strain.

It's sweet. And dull. And, OK, excruciting. [July 2008, p.74]